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The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability
of FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE. This release starts off the new 8-STABLE branch
which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.X and introduces many
new features. Some of the highlights:

The FreeBSD Project dedicates this release to the memories of
Jean-Marc Zucconi (jmz@) and John Birrell (jb@) who passed away
in May and November of 2009 respectively. Jean-Marc and John were
both FreeBSD committers since the mid-1990s and made extensive
contributions to the operating system. They will be missed.

Availability
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FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE is now available for the amd64, i386, ia64, pc98,
powerpc, and sparc64 architectures.

FreeBSD 8.0 can be installed from bootable ISO images or over the
network. Some architectures (currently amd64 and i386) also support
installing from a USB memory stick. The required files can be downloaded
via FTP or BitTorrent as described in the sections below. While some
of the smaller FTP mirrors may not carry all architectures, they will
all generally contain the more common ones such as amd64 and i386.

MD5 and SHA256 hashes for the release ISO and memory stick images are
included at the bottom of this message.

The purpose of the images provided as part of the release are as follows:

dvd1: This contains everything necessary to install the base FreeBSD
operating system, a collection of pre-built packages, and the
documentation. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based
rescue mode. This should be all you need if you can burn
and use DVD-sized media.

disc1: This contains the base FreeBSD operating system and the
documentation packages for CDROM-sized media. There are no
other packages.

livefs: This contains support for booting into a "livefs" based
rescue mode but does not support doing an install from the
CD itself. It is meant to help rescue an existing system
but could be used to do a network based install if necessary.

bootonly: This supports booting a machine using the CDROM drive but
does not contain the support for installing FreeBSD from the
CD itself. You would need to perform a network based install
(e.g. from an FTP server) after booting from the CD.

memstick: This can be written to an USB memory stick (flash drive) and
used to do an install on machines capable of booting off USB
drives. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue
mode. The documentation packages are provided but no other
packages.

As one example of how to use the memstick image, assuming the USB drive
appears as /dev/da0 on your machine something like this should work:

# dd if=8.0-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img of=/dev/da0 bs240 conv=sync

Be careful to make sure you get the target (of=) correct.

FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE can also be purchased on CD-ROM or DVD from several
vendors. One of the vendors that will be offering FreeBSD 8.0-based
products is:

During this process, FreeBSD Update may ask the user to help by merging
some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically
performed merging was done correctly.

# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.

# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new
userland components:

# freebsd-update install

At this point, users of systems being upgraded from FreeBSD 8.0-BETA2 or
earlier will be prompted by freebsd-update to rebuild all third-party
applications (e.g., ports installed from the ports tree) due to updates
in system libraries. See:

for more details. After updating installed third-party applications
(and again, only if freebsd-update printed a message indicating that
this was necessary), run freebsd-update again so that it can delete the
old (no longer used) system libraries:

# freebsd-update install

Finally, reboot into 8.0-RELEASE:

# shutdown -r now

Support
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The FreeBSD Security Team currently plans to support FreeBSD 8.0 until
November 30th, 2010. For more information on the Security Team and
their support of the various FreeBSD branches see: